"'It all began over drinks,' [Tristram] Hunt writes of the forty-year collaboration between Karl Marx and his benefactor, ghostwriter, and best friend, Friedrich Engels. Engels's life was defined by an awkward tension. When he could afford it, he was a muckraking journalist, street-fighting revolutionary, and international libertine. When he couldn't, he was tethered to Manchester and his father's cotton mill, supplying Marx with the money (and the empirical evidence) he needed to complete Das Kapital. This greatly enjoyable biography of 'the original champagne communist' is a perceptive tour not just through Engels's life but through philosophy and political thought in the 19th century, though it will inevitably be read through the lens of the 20th. Engels saw the existence of the Slavs 'in the heart of Europe as an anachronism,' at once indicating a low opinion of the people who would first embrace Marxism and hinting at the pitiless path Communism later took'."—The New Yorker